Traditional wireless communication systems, such as those operating under third generation partnership project (3GPP) standards and specifications, as well as 3GPP long term evolution (LTE), LTE-advanced (LTE-A), have frequently been focused on the use of dedicated physical and computational resources to serve users in a particular location, with a base station serving users in a more or less well defined area. Different base stations may cooperate with one another, particularly if they overlap one another's coverage area, but the focus has generally been on the placement of physical resources and the control of those resources.
In recent years, communication and computing technology has allowed for more and more applications directed to virtualization of resources—for example, virtual computing machines—“cloud” computing, or virtual—“cloud” storage, in which various hardware and software installations are. It is also possible to design or configure wireless communication resources so as to present “virtual” cells or other radio access network elements, in which one or more controlling elements allocates functions to available physical resources to perform desired functions and achieve a desired configuration.